Jude the Obscure

ue sat looking at the bare floor of the room, the house being little
more than an old intramural cottage, and then she regarded the scene
outside the uncurtained window. At some distance opposite, the outer
walls of Sarcophagus College—silent, black, and windowless—threw their
four centuries of gloom, bigotry, and decay into the little room she
occupied, shutting out the moonlight by night and the sun by day. The
outlines of Rubric College also were discernible beyond the other, and
the tower of a third farther off still. She thought of the strange
operation of a simple-minded man’s ruling passion, that it should have
led Jude, who loved her and the children so tenderly, to place them
here in this depressing purlieu, because he was still haunted by his
dream. Even now he did not distinctly hear the freezing negative that
those scholared walls had echoed to his desire.

The failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in this house
for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy—a brooding
undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him. The silence was
broken by his saying: “Mother, what shall we do to-morrow!”

“I don’t know!” said Sue despondently. “I am afraid this will trouble
your father.”

“I wish Father was quite well, and there had been room for him! Then it
wouldn’t matter so much! Poor Father!”

“It wouldn’t!”

“Can I do anything?”

“No! All is trouble, adversity, and suffering!”

“Father went away to give us children room, didn’t he?”

“Partly.”

“It would be better to be out o’ the world than in it, wouldn’t it?”

“It would almost, dear.”

“’Tis because of us children, too, isn’t it, that you can’t get a good
lodging?”

“Well—people do object to children sometimes.”

“Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have ’em?”

“Oh—because it is a law of nature.”

“But we don’t ask to be born?”

“No indeed.”

“And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my real mother,
and you needn’t have had me unless you liked. I oughtn’t to have come
to ’ee—that’s the real truth! I troubled ’em in Australia, and I
trouble folk here. I wish I hadn’t been born!”

“You couldn’t help it, my dear.”

“I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should
be killed directly, before their souls come to ’em, and not allowed to
grow big and walk about!”

Sue did not reply. She was doubtfully pondering how to treat this too
reflective child.

She at last concluded that, so far as circumstances permitted, she
would be honest and candid with one who entered into her difficulties
like an aged friend.

“There is going to be another in our family soon,” she hesitatingly
remarked.

“How?”

“There is going to be another baby.”

“What!” The boy jumped up wildly. “Oh God, Mother, you’ve never a-sent
for another; and such trouble with what you’ve got!”

“Yes, I have, I am sorry to say!” murmured Sue, her eyes glistening
with suspended tears.

The boy burst out weeping. “Oh you don’t care, you don’t care!” he
cried in bitter reproach. “How ever could you, Mother, be so wicked
and cruel as this, when you needn’t have done it till we was better
off, and Father well! To bring us all into more trouble! No room for
us, and Father a-forced to go away, and we turned out to-morrow; and
yet you be going to have another of us soon! … ’Tis done o’
purpose!—’tis—’tis!” He walked up and down sobbing.

“Y-you must forgive me, little Jude!” she pleaded, her bosom heaving
now as much as the boy’s. “I can’t explain—I will when you are older.
It does seem—as if I had done it on purpose, now we are in these
difficulties! I can’t explain, dear! But it—is not quite on purpose—I
can’t help it!”

“Yes it is—it must be! For nobody would interfere with us, like that,
unless you agreed! I won’t forgive you, ever, ever! I’ll never believe
you care for me, or Father, or any of us any more!”

He got up, and went away into the closet adjoining her room, in which a
bed had been spread on the floor. There she heard him say: “If we
children was gone there’d be no trouble at all!”

“Don’t think that, dear,” she cried, rather peremptorily. “But go to
sleep!”

The following morning she awoke at a little past six, and decided to
get up and run across before breakfast to the inn which Jude had
informed her to be his quarters, to tell him what had happened before
he went out. She arose softly, to avoid disturbing the children, who,
as she knew, must be fatigued by their exertions of yesterday.

She found Jude at breakfast in the obscure tavern he had chosen as a
counterpoise to the expense of her lodging: and she explained to him
her homelessness. He had been so anxious about her all night, he said.
Somehow, now it was morning, the request to leave the lodgings did not
seem such a depressing incident as it had seemed the night before, nor
did even her failure to find another place affect her so deeply as at
first. Jude agreed with her that it would not be worth while to insist
upon her right to stay a week, but to take immediate steps for removal.

“You must all come to this inn for a day or two,” he said. “It is a
rough place, and it will not be so nice for the children, but we shall
have more time to look round. There are plenty of lodgings in the
suburbs—in my old quarter of Beersheba. Have breakfast with me now you
are here, my bird. You are sure you are well? There will be plenty of
time to get back and prepare the children’s meal before they wake. In
fact, I’ll go with you.”

She joined Jude in a hasty meal, and in a quarter of an hour they
started together, resolving to clear out from Sue’s too respectable
lodging immediately. On reaching the place and going upstairs she found
that all was quiet in the children’s room, and called to the landlady
in timorous tones to please bring up the tea-kettle and something for
their breakfast. This was perfunctorily done, and producing a couple of
eggs which she had brought with her she put them into the boiling
kettle, and summoned Jude to watch them for the youngsters, while she
went to call them, it being now about half-past eight o’clock.

Jude stood bending over the kettle, with his watch in his hand, timing
the eggs, so that his back was turned to the little inner chamber where
the children lay. A shriek from Sue suddenly caused him to start round.
He saw that the door of the room, or rather closet—which had seemed to
go heavily upon its hinges as she pushed it back—was open, and that Sue
had sunk to the floor just within it. Hastening forward to pick her up
he turned his eyes to the little bed spread on the boards; no children
were there. He looked in bewilderment round the room. At the back of
the door were fixed two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the
forms of the two youngest children were suspended, by a piece of
box-cord round each of their necks, while from a nail a few yards off
the body of little Jude was hanging in a similar manner. An overturned
chair was near the elder boy, and his glazed eyes were slanted into the
room; but those of the girl and the baby boy were closed.

Half-paralyzed by the strange and consummate horror of the scene, he
let Sue lie, cut the cords with his pocket-knife and threw the three
children on the bed; but the feel of their bodies in the momentary
handling seemed to say that they were dead. He caught up Sue, who was
in fainting fits, and put her on the bed in the other room, after which
he breathlessly summoned the landlady and ran out for a doctor.

When he got back Sue had come to herself, and the two helpless women,
bending over the children in wild efforts to restore them, and the
triplet of little corpses, formed a sight which overthrew his
self-command. The nearest surgeon came in, but, as Jude had inferred,
his presence was superfluous. The children were past saving, for though
their bodies were still barely cold it was conjectured that they had
been hanging more than an hour. The probability held by the parents
later on, when they were able to reason on the case, was that the elder
boy, on waking, looked into the outer room for Sue, and, finding her
absent, was thrown into a fit of aggravated despondency that the events
and information of the evening before had induced in his morbid
temperament. Moreover a piece of paper was found upon the floor, on
which was written, in the boy’s hand, with the bit of lead pencil that
he carried:

Done because we are too menny.

At sight of this Sue’s nerves utterly gave way, an awful conviction
that her discourse with the boy had been the main cause of the tragedy,
throwing her into a convulsive agony which knew no abatement. They
carried her away against her wish to a room on the lower floor; and
there she lay, her slight figure shaken with her gasps, and her eyes
staring at the ceiling, the woman of the house vainly trying to soothe
her.

They could hear from this chamber the people moving about above, and
she implored to be allowed to go back, and was only kept from doing so
by the assurance that, if there were any hope, her presence might do
harm, and the reminder that it was necessary to take care of herself
lest she should endanger a coming life. Her inquiries were incessant,
and at last Jude came down and told her there was no hope. As soon as
she could speak she informed him what she had said to the boy, and how
she thought herself the cause of this.

“No,” said Jude. “It was in his nature to do it. The Doctor says there
are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the
last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all
its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist
them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to
live. He’s an advanced man, the Doctor: but he can give no consolation
to—”

Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now broke
down; and this stimulated Sue to efforts of sympathy which in some
degree distracted her from her poignant self-reproach. When everybody
was gone, she was allowed to see the children.

The boy’s face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that
little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which
had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes,
fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their
expression in a single term. For the rashness of those parents he had
groaned, for their ill assortment he had quaked, and for the
misfortunes of these he had died.

When the house was silent, and they could do nothing but await the
coroner’s inquest, a subdued, large, low voice spread into the air of
the room from behind the heavy walls at the back.

“What is it?” said Sue, her spasmodic breathing suspended.

“The organ of the college chapel. The organist practising I suppose.
It’s the anthem from the seventy-third Psalm; ‘Truly God is loving unto
Israel.’”

She sobbed again. “Oh, oh my babies! They had done no harm! Why should
they have been taken away, and not I!”

There was another stillness—broken at last by two persons in
conversation somewhere without.

“They are talking about us, no doubt!” moaned Sue. “‘We are made a
spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!’”

Jude listened—“No—they are not talking of us,” he said. “They are two
clergymen of different views, arguing about the eastward position. Good
God—the eastward position, and all creation groaning!”

Then another silence, till she was seized with another uncontrollable
fit of grief. “There is something external to us which says, ‘You
shan’t!’ First it said, ‘You shan’t learn!’ Then it said, ‘You shan’t
labour!’ Now it says, ‘You shan’t love!’”

He tried to soothe her by saying, “That’s bitter of you, darling.”

“But it’s true!”

Thus they waited, and she went back again to her room. The baby’s
frock, shoes, and socks, which had been lying on a chair at the time of
his death, she would not now have removed, though Jude would fain have
got them out of her sight. But whenever he touched them she implored
him to let them lie, and burst out almost savagely at the woman of the
house when she also attempted to put them away.

Jude dreaded her dull apathetic silences almost more than her
paroxysms. “Why don’t you speak to me, Jude?” she cried out, after one
of these. “Don’t turn away from me! I can’t bear the loneliness of
being out of your looks!”

“There, dear; here I am,” he said, putting his face close to hers.

“Yes… Oh, my comrade, our perfect union—our two-in-oneness—is now
stained with blood!”

“Shadowed by death—that’s all.”

“Ah; but it was I who incited him really, though I didn’t know I was
doing it! I talked to the child as one should only talk to people of
mature age. I said the world was against us, that it was better to be
out of life than in it at this price; and he took it literally. And I
told him I was going to have another child. It upset him. Oh how
bitterly he upbraided me!”

“Why did you do it, Sue?”

“I can’t tell. It was that I wanted to be truthful. I couldn’t bear
deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn’t truthful, for
with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely.—Why was I half-wiser
than my fellow-women? And not entirely wiser! Why didn’t I tell him
pleasant untruths, instead of half-realities? It was my want of
self-control, so that I could neither conceal things nor reveal them!”

“Your plan might have been a good one for the majority of cases; only
in our peculiar case it chanced to work badly perhaps. He must have
known sooner or later.”

“And I was just making my baby darling a new frock; and now I shall
never see him in it, and never talk to him any more! … My eyes are so
swollen that I can scarcely see; and yet little more than a year ago I
called myself happy! We went about loving each other too much—indulging
ourselves to utter selfishness with each other! We said—do you
remember?—that we would make a virtue of joy. I said it was Nature’s
intention, Nature’s law and raison d’être that we should be joyful in
what instincts she afforded us—instincts which civilization had taken
upon itself to thwart. What dreadful things I said! And now Fate has
given us this stab in the back for being such fools as to take Nature
at her word!”

She sank into a quiet contemplation, till she said, “It is best,
perhaps, that they should be gone.—Yes—I see it is! Better that they
should be plucked fresh than stay to wither away miserably!”

“Yes,” replied Jude. “Some say that the elders should rejoice when
their children die in infancy.”

“But they don’t know! … Oh my babies, my babies, could you be alive
now! You may say the boy wished to be out of life, or he wouldn’t have
done it. It was not unreasonable for him to die: it was part of his
incurably sad nature, poor little fellow! But then the others—my own
children and yours!”

Again Sue looked at the hanging little frock and at the socks and
shoes; and her figure quivered like a string. “I am a pitiable
creature,” she said, “good neither for earth nor heaven any more! I am
driven out of my mind by things! What ought to be done?” She stared at
Jude, and tightly held his hand.

“Nothing can be done,” he replied. “Things are as they are, and will be
brought to their destined issue.”

She paused. “Yes! Who said that?” she asked heavily.

“It comes in the chorus of the Agamemnon. It has been in my mind
continually since this happened.”

“My poor Jude—how you’ve missed everything!—you more than I, for I did
get you! To think you should know that by your unassisted reading, and
yet be in poverty and despair!”

After such momentary diversions her grief would return in a wave.

The jury duly came and viewed the bodies, the inquest was held; and
next arrived the melancholy morning of the funeral. Accounts in the
newspapers had brought to the spot curious idlers, who stood apparently
counting the window-panes and the stones of the walls. Doubt of the
real relations of the couple added zest to their curiosity. Sue had
declared that she would follow the two little ones to the grave, but at
the last moment she gave way, and the coffins were quietly carried out
of the house while she was lying down. Jude got into the vehicle, and
it drove away, much to the relief of the landlord, who now had only Sue
and her luggage remaining on his hands, which he hoped to be also clear
of later on in the day, and so to have freed his house from the
exasperating notoriety it had acquired during the week through his
wife’s unlucky admission of these strangers. In the afternoon he
privately consulted with the owner of the house, and they agreed that
if any objection to it arose from the tragedy which had occurred there
they would try to get its number changed.

When Jude had seen the two little boxes—one containing little Jude, and
the other the two smallest—deposited in the earth he hastened back to
Sue, who was still in her room, and he therefore did not disturb her
just then. Feeling anxious, however, he went again about four o’clock.
The woman thought she was still lying down, but returned to him to say
that she was not in her bedroom after all. Her hat and jacket, too,
were missing: she had gone out. Jude hurried off to the public house
where he was sleeping. She had not been there. Then bethinking himself
of possibilities he went along the road to the cemetery, which he
entered, and crossed to where the interments had recently taken place.
The idlers who had followed to the spot by reason of the tragedy were
all gone now. A man with a shovel in his hands was attempting to earth
in the common grave of the three children, but his arm was held back by
an expostulating woman who stood in the half-filled hole. It was Sue,
whose coloured clothing, which she had never thought of changing for
the mourning he had bought, suggested to the eye a deeper grief than
the conventional garb of bereavement could express.

“He’s filling them in, and he shan’t till I’ve seen my little ones
again!” she cried wildly when she saw Jude. “I want to see them once
more. Oh Jude—please Jude—I want to see them! I didn’t know you would
let them be taken away while I was asleep! You said perhaps I should
see them once more before they were screwed down; and then you didn’t,
but took them away! Oh Jude, you are cruel to me too!”

“She’s been wanting me to dig out the grave again, and let her get to
the coffins,” said the man with the spade. “She ought to be took home,
by the look o’ her. She is hardly responsible, poor thing, seemingly.
Can’t dig ’em up again now, ma’am. Do ye go home with your husband, and
take it quiet, and thank God that there’ll be another soon to swage yer
grief.”

But Sue kept asking piteously: “Can’t I see them once more—just once!
Can’t I? Only just one little minute, Jude? It would not take long! And
I should be so glad, Jude! I will be so good, and not disobey you ever
any more, Jude, if you will let me? I would go home quietly afterwards,
and not want to see them any more! Can’t I? Why can’t I?”

Thus she went on. Jude was thrown into such acute sorrow that he almost
felt he would try to get the man to accede. But it could do no good,
and might make her still worse; and he saw that it was imperative to
get her home at once. So he coaxed her, and whispered tenderly, and put
his arm round her to support her; till she helplessly gave in, and was
induced to leave the cemetery.

He wished to obtain a fly to take her back in, but economy being so
imperative she deprecated his doing so, and they walked along slowly,
Jude in black crape, she in brown and red clothing. They were to have
gone to a new lodging that afternoon, but Jude saw that it was not
practicable, and in course of time they entered the now hated house.
Sue was at once got to bed, and the Doctor sent for.

Jude waited all the evening downstairs. At a very late hour the
intelligence was brought to him that a child had been prematurely born,
and that it, like the others, was a corpse.